


No Relief in Bitterness

by Vendication



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: (they got better), Alternate Universe - Time Travel, Angst, Body Horror, Canon-Typical Body Horror, Canon-Typical Violence, Canon-Typical Worms (The Magnus Archives), Canonical Character Death, Content Warnings in Author's Note, Gen, Mentioned Not Sasha James, Mentioned Sasha James, My First Fanfic, Not Beta Read, POV Tim Stoker (The Magnus Archives), Sasha James is Sir Appearing-In-Chapter-2, Sasha James is Sir Not-Appearing-In-This-Chapter, Spoilers for The Magnus Archives Season 3, Temporary Character Death, Time Travel Fix-It, end of Season 3 Tim's canonical suicidal thoughts and actions, its almost certainly not as descriptive as canon but tagging it just in case never hurts, kind of?, specifically the fuck allowance, the author is american and apologises for inaccuracies, tim goes over the rq swears budget
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-30
Updated: 2020-11-25
Packaged: 2021-03-07 17:49:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 10,507
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26641714
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vendication/pseuds/Vendication
Summary: Tim Stoker dies during the Unknowing in August 2017. Tim Stoker wakes up in the Archives in March 2016. He takes this about as well as you'd expect.aka a tim(e) travel fix-it.title is from the song encoder, by pendulum.
Comments: 21
Kudos: 101





	1. might as well let it die

**Author's Note:**

> hey! This is the first fic I've ever written and also the first creative writing I've completed in a long time. I really wanted to write something involving time-travel because it's one of my favorite things to read in fanfic. Like, the instant I get into something new I'm heading to ao3 to look at everything tagged with 'time travel'. So this is a hugely self-indulgent semi-fix-it fic.
> 
> Since this is a self-indulgent fix-it I did alter or add some events to the canon timeline; I think the most important thing is that Jon told the assistants about all the entities? (because from what I remember we never hear about him telling them about it, at least not in season 3?)  
>    
> 
> 
> Content warnings (not including those listed in the tags): Canon-typical Jane Prentiss, and The Corruption (uncleanliness and insects). Mentions of suicide and suicidal thoughts and actions, scars, unintentional gaslighting, arguing and miscommunication, unreality and derealization, memory alteration/memory loss/ forgetting a person (permanently), smoking, vomiting/vomit mentions, violence (I don't think my descriptions are as graphic as canon but it's still there), fire, brief mentions of knives.
> 
> If I've missed something that should be tagged, let me know and I'll put it up there.
> 
> (i'm posting this right before i go to work so i don't have the ability to overthink and delete this thirty minutes later)

Tim presses down on the detonator praying that it’ll be the last thing he ever does. Prays that he’ll die and his consciousness will be utterly destroyed, and that he’ll finally be free of the Institute, the Circus, and Jon.

But his oblivion doesn’t come. He feels alive, heart pounding erratically and blood rushing so loud he can hardly hear through the susurrations. He can’t have survived that blast, though, not from where he was standing. So how is he here? What happened?

“Tim? Tim, are you quite alright?” The voice that jolts him into awareness is stern but worried, and unfortunately, familiar.

“Fuck no. Fuck _no_ ,” he groans, despair and fury and panic threading through him.

“ _Tim_?” Jonathan Sims sounds scandalized now.

Tim’s pretty sure he’s sitting at a desk, head rested in folded arms like he’s fallen asleep there. He pulls his head up but does not look over at Jon, instead peering down at familiar woodgrain. If he so much as glances at that man, he is going to go ballistic.

“Oh, so _literally_ killing myself wasn’t enough? You had to find a way to bring me back? You thought you could just add to the list of unforgivable things you've done?!” His nails scrape against the top of the desk as his hands curl into fists. Jon’s tied him to that Leitner, hasn’t he? The one that Gerard Keay had been stuck in. Jon must’ve figured it out, his god shoving a guide into his brain. Or maybe the knowledge was gifted to Jon, a reward for stopping the Unknowing.

Tim seethes. It’s a twisted, coiling feeling, winding its way through his veins. How fucking _dare_ he! Jon had no right! Tim should be dead and gone, free from every reminder of existence, free from feeling, free from a world where lives could be irrevocably destroyed without warning.

“I—what—Tim, what?” Jon stumbles over the words as if this is all a **_big_** _shock_. It shouldn’t be! Tim hadn’t paid much attention when Jon went over Gerard Keay and Keay’s knowledge on the entities—he was too preoccupied with attempting to avoid the new assistants—but he was sure that a person’s page had to be read in order to summon them. Jon would’ve had to bind and summon Tim himself. No one else would ever have allowed it.

If he has to force a confrontation with Jon to get the truth, then he will. He’s earned that right. Turning the chair, he looks Jon in the eyes, and freezes.

They’re in the Archives. Only one overhead light is on. The soft lighting smooths out the sharp angles of Jon’s face, making his concerned expression more believable, and has the added bonus of covering up his worm scars.

Vertigo rushes over Tim like he’s been thrown out of a plane. _T_ _he scars aren’t there_. He looks closer at Jon’s face, panic rising into his lungs, and he still can’t see them. It’s not a trick of the light, it’s not makeup, nothing should be able to cover those scars that flawlessly—Tim’s tried.

Words come out half formed as he stumbles over them. He tries to make sense of his thoughts but it’s no use. He settles on asking, “Your—where are your scars, Jon?” Scars can’t just disappear! They've got to be there. The scars can’t _not_ be there.

Jon narrows his brows in confusion. The trailing scar that slices through his left eyebrow is no longer there. “Tim,” he says, patiently—and what a rare occurrence that is, “I don’t have any scars.”

Tim’s arguing back on reflex before he can even think. “Yeah, you do! I was there, I have the exact same kind—the worms weren’t exactly _subtle_ when they tried to eat us alive!” This familiar anger pulls the vertigo back, and Tim uses that brief moment to stand and lean over the desk, facing Jon at full height. He pulls his shirt collar back and points the other hand to his neck, where the raised scar marking the path a worm took through his body rests. His fingers meet unblemished skin.

He’s left reeling, and stumbles backwards, spreading his arms out to catch his balance.  
  
“Tim?!” Jon seems to be startled by this reaction, stepping around the desk and grabbing Tim’s arm to help steady him. Tim feels the cool, smooth skin of Jon’s palm where there’s meant to be a burned-in handprint , and he thinks he might vomit.  
  
Jon motions for Tim to sit back down and he does, collapsing back into the office chair. This is his old one, the one he’d nabbed from his desk in Research because he’d broken the back so it could recline. After Prentiss, there’d been so many worms on it he’d had the thing thrown out. The familiarity should be a comfort to him, but it feels wrong. Like stepping into a classroom long after you’ve graduated.

Tim leans forwards with his elbows on his knees, cradling his head in his hands. His fingers tangle through his hair. “This… Jon…This can’t be happening. This isn’t the kind of thing that’s possible.”  
  
Even if he’d been trying to avoid speaking with Basira and Melanie, he thinks he’d have noticed if Jon had mentioned actual time travel as part of an eldritch horror god’s wheelhouse. Right?

Unless Jon had said something about it and he was stupid enough to miss it. The Spiral, it could be the Spiral, right? He’d lived it. Time didn’t work right in Michael’s halls—they'd walked for what felt like weeks through those twisting, forever bright hallways, only to exit a few hours after they’d entered.  
  
But, no, that theory doesn’t make sense. He doesn’t remember getting thrown into the hallways after the explosion, and, from his admittedly brief experience with them, they can only distort time _inside_ them. Obviously, the entities and their monster servants play fast and loose with concepts like physics and other rules governing reality, but it seems like whoever controls the hallways shouldn’t have the ability to send someone back before they’ve stepped through the doors. Does that make this all fake, then? Something concocted to fuck with him?

He forces himself to take a deep breath and then another, trying to stave off the panic, tugging on his hair like it can ground him. If he’s been thrown into an illusion by the Distortion or some other Spiral monster or even a completely different entity, then it’s feeding off him. Better to starve it than strangle himself on the snare. And if it’s not an illusion, then being calm will work wonders to help him adjust to the fact he’s _gone back in_ _fucking_ _time_.  
  
“Tim? Do you need me to take you to the hospital?” Jon asks, hesitantly.

Jon’s hair is far shorter than it was inside the Wax Museum, and is slicked back, though at this hour the product is beginning to lose its hold. His grey hairs have only just started to come in around his temples, aren’t the thick streaks of silver Tim remembers. His glasses are different, too; this pair was broken during Prentiss' attack.  
  
Tim’s laugh is bitter. “Nothing the hospital can do. What’s the date? 2015, 2016?”  
  
“Tim… you don’t know the date?” Jon questions. His expression shifts to pensive—eyes angled up and to the left and moving in slight saccades as he shifts his train of thought. Is he trying to figure out a tactful way to convince Tim to see a doctor? That’ll be a giant waste of both of their time; Jon and tact have never been well acquainted.

“You know what—” Tim says, flippantly, waving a hand to interrupt Jon’s overthinking, “—don’t bother. I can figure it out. You don’t know anything about the worms, so let me ask you this, _boss_ ,” he can’t hold back the sharp tone that bubbles up there, “is Prentiss still pretending to be Martin, or have you not done the Vittery statement yet?”  
  
Jon huffs. “ _Excuse me_? Tim, Martin's told us he’s sick—and you think it’s Jane Prentiss—why on earth would she be pretending to be **_Martin_** at _his_ _flat_?” Jon takes his phone out of a pocket, and seems to be pulling up his text messages.

Well, that narrows it down. " _Wonderful_!” His smile is pained and his tone is positively saturated in bitterness. “ How grand is that! I get sent back in time, but of course it has to be too late to do anything that could actually matter! I’m still stuck in this hellhole, same as Martin and Mel— wait. _Holy shit_.”  
  
Jon stares at him. He frowns, confusion etched in the angle of his eyebrows and the widening of his eyes. The phone’s forgotten in his hands.  
  
“ _ **Sasha**_ ,” Tim breathes. His knees might’ve given out if he wasn’t already sitting. She’s here. She has a face, a voice.“Jon. Jon, do you have any photos of Sasha?” He speaks quickly, intensely focused.

This is, of course, not the sort of question he should be asking to someone worried about his memory. Jon scans Tim’s face for a reaction; trying to see if Tim’s joking, probably. Jon would be trying to write this off as an elaborate prank. “Tim, why do you need a photo of Sasha? You know what she looks like.”  
  
“No, I don’t! I don’t remember her at _all,_ ” he argues. He tries to keep his anguish tamped down, like he's a potter smashing clay, as if he can avoid thinking about it by squeezing the emotions into the smallest possible space they can occupy in the back of his mind. 

Because there’s a person shaped void in his thoughts and memories where Sasha James sits. No, not even a void, because you can see a void, you can know that it exists. Calling it a blindspot would be more accurate, because sometimes he forgets about her entirely, doesn't even remember that she exists. And when he does remember, well, that absence is so seamless that on late nights when he's lost in doubt, he finds himself questioning if Sasha had even been real, or if Not-Sasha had made her up.

His best guess is that having his memories altered twice—once initially and then again when he learned that the Not-Sasha was, well, Not the Real-Sasha—had been enough to corrupt his memories like a magnet to a hard drive.   
  
He knows that she was one of his best friends, in the way people know things without consciously having learned them. Since they were close friends, he can extrapolate that they _**must**_ have had shared hobbies, gone out for drinks, been to each others’ flats, cooked for each other, seen movies, had inside jokes, but the memories don’t exist. There’s nothing there. And Tim hates himself for it.

He wants to know _something_ about her.  
  
Desperation has him reaching out a hand to Jon’s sweater covered arm, pleading though it disgusts him to do so. “Please, Jon, if you have _anything.”_ His voice cracks sharply as he continues, “Something replaced her, pretended it was her for _a year_ and none of us noticed. I don’t remember her face, I don’t know her voice, Jon. _Please_.”

Jon is clearly unsettled. He taps on his screen to pull up a different conversation and opens up a photo. “From the Institute holiday party,” he says. Tim barely restrains the urge to snatch the phone from Jon’s hands. “After this, Tim, I think we ought to go to the hospital. This… I am concerned.”  
  
Jon passes the phone to Tim casually, like he wants Tim to see a cat picture or something equally mundane. Jon can’t understand how valuable the photograph is, how priceless the knowledge captured in it happens to be.  
  
With shaking hands, Tim pulls the phone close. It’s as Jon said; the photo is at some venue the Institute rented out—Tim’s fuzzy on the details for obvious reasons—and it must be from the old Archive group text that had stopped working. It’s strange to see a photograph he can’t remember taking.

Martin looks like, well, Martin. No surprise there. He’s flushed either because he’s standing next to Jon or because he might be just a _little_ bit tipsy. Or both. Jon has a neutral expression that somehow manages to look mildly unenthused, and then there’s Tim himself, standing next to Jon, beaming as he takes the selfie. And then there’s Sasha.

“Oh,” he says softly.

There’s no sudden revelation. His memories don’t reshape themselves. It’s just as Elias had said; Sasha’s just another stranger. The thought of Elias having been right is enough to make him clench his fists, nails digging painfully deep into his palms. Sasha was his best friend, she’d died trying to get help during Prentiss’ attack, and he wouldn't recognize her if she passed him on the street.  
  
It occurs to him then, desperately trying to keep himself together, blinking back tears, that Jane Prentiss is alive and in an easily accessible location. If he goes to Martin’s flat, kills her before she can attack the Institute, he can irrevocably derail the timeline. The Unknowing will still end up happening, but the rest of it? Sasha being replaced, him getting torn into by worms, Jon’s ridiculous invasions of their privacy, stepping through that yellow door into hallways that go on and on and on and on—none of that _needs_ to happen. And after he kills Prentiss, he can track down that skin stealing clown and wipe her Circus out.

It doesn’t register that he’s on his feet until he notices he’s swaying slightly. Jon’s phone is set on top of the desk. “I’m going to Martin’s flat. Don’t text Martin, there’s no telling what Prentiss might do if she realizes someone’s on to her.”  
  
Jon pulls himself to his full height (which is still shorter than Tim), and narrows his eyes, channeling his bossy persona. In a stern voice he says, “Tim, we really ought to—”  
  
Tim cuts him off. “I don't need to see anybody, Jon! I _know_ what’s happening. I’m going to go to Jane Prentiss and I’m gonna kill her.” Tim starts to head towards the corridor leading to the stairs. Where _is_ he going to get fire extinguishers? All the shops that might sell them in the quantities he needs are closed by now. The Archives do have a few extinguishers, even pre-Prentiss, but this Jon would never let Tim take them off the premises—would come up with various implausible what-if scenarios as reasons why the extinguishers had to stay behind.

In his peripheral vision he sees Jon trailing behind him. Tim turns his head to look over his shoulder, lips pressed in a thin line, and inhales sharply in frustration. Is Jon incapable of leaving him alone? “What, you want to go and record this for posterity?” he says with vitriol. He doesn't want to give any more of himself to the thing that listens to the tapes. It already has his statement.

“Tim,” Jon says, the stern academic inflection back in his voice, “As your direct superior, and as your friend, it would be incredibly remiss of me to leave you by yourself, especially while you’re so concerned about Jane Prentiss. If I can’t convince you to not go to Martin’s flat, I’ll be coming with you.”

“ _Fine_ ,” Tim concedes through clenched teeth. It’s easier to let Jon come along than to try and convince him to leave Tim be. Encountering Prentiss in the flesh might also destroy the sceptic act early—he’d taken Prentiss seriously enough before, and seeing her at Martin’s flat might be enough to keep him from writing the time travel off. It’s not that Tim needs Jon to believe him, it’s just that if Jon believes him, he’ll leave Tim alone.

It does occur to Tim that with Jon coming along, he won't be able to get any weapons. This Jon isn't the same Jon that somehow managed to get his hands on an ax (and _how_ did he manage to buy it without coming off as incredibly suspicious?). This Jon doesn’t believe Tim, not really, so there’s no way he’d entertain the thought of Tim trying to cobble together a makeshift weapon from whatever he can find at a corner shop.

So Tim checks his pockets. He’s got his wallet, phone, and his keychain. Great. He’ll just bean Prentiss with his keychain and hope that his collection of keys and a multitool will somehow manage to hurt her. Fan-fucking-tastic.

Although... they might have a lighter, for all the good a tiny flame will do them. Tim had seen Jon smoking in the faint pre-dawn light outside their accommodations that morning, cigarette grasped inelegantly in his burnt hand. He’d gone and stood next to Jon as he smoked, gave in to the instinctual urge to follow Jon's line of sight to where it terminated on the rental car. The early summer morning had been cool and wet and dew had been shimmering on the nearby bushes. 

Jon had wordlessly held out the carton. Tim had stared at the thing in confusion for a moment. He had only ever been a social smoker, so it'd been a while. Fuck it, he’d figured, he might as well—he was going to be dead before the day was out, a cigarette or two wasn't going to be what did him in. Jon passed him a lighter with a web engraved on it, and they’d smoked in silence until Basira and Daisy joined them.  
  
Jon stopped smoking before Tim was hired at the Institute, but Jon tended to keep things he thought he might need later in his bag; there’s a possibility he never removed his lighter from his satchel when he quit smoking. It’s a bit of a stretch, but not entirely improbable.  
  
Tim asks about it while they exit the Institute.  
  
“I don’t allow sources of ignition in the Archives, Tim,” Jon tells him as if he’s managed to memorise that exact phrase. He probably has; his devotion to this place started early. Jon does dig through his satchel, though, as they continue down the street.

Tim shivers. His past self had to have come in with a coat but he hadn’t thought to grab it on the way out. He still hasn’t processed that it’s not August.

Jon produces a beat up looking lighter from the depths of his satchel and slides it into his coat pocket. Tim’s not stupid enough to ask him to hand it over.

Satisfied that they have at least one potential weapon to use against Prentiss, he picks up his pace. The faster they go, the less time Tim has to stand in the cold, and the sooner Prentiss will be taken care of.

* * *

“Tim, this looks just like any other building. Completely normal. We don’t even have to go inside.”

Tim clenches his jaw in frustration because Jon is right. Most of the flats are lit up and he can see shadows of movement in the gaps between curtains. There’s nothing about this place that suggests it’s been taken over by a being with worms crawling through her cratered, birdlike bones.

He shakes his head.“Yeah, no, we’re going in,” he says, marching towards the door. Prentiss _has_ to be there.

“Christ, Tim.” Jon hurries after him. One of his dress shoes scuffs loudly as he tries to match Tim's pace.  
  
The stairwell is cooler than the rest of the building, and the sounds of people carrying on with their lives filter through the thin walls. Someone is blasting music loud enough that Tim can identify the song — some popular song from this year that he now hears when he buys groceries.  
  
A fire extinguisher catches his eye and he yanks it off the wall where it hangs.  
  
Jon stares.

“The worms don’t like fire extinguishers,” is all Tim says in response. Jon can make of that what he will.

Jon doesn’t argue.

There’s another one at the top of the second flight of stairs and Tim shoves it under his other arm. Jon says nothing but sighs and presses a hand to his nose bridge, shaking his head.

The air shifts as they reach the third floor. The pressure in the air is palpable and there’s an underlying musty smell, oddly cloying, that reminds Tim of the wet, earthy undersides of rocks.

Tim grabs the third floor’s extinguisher and passes it to Jon. Jon takes it with a disgruntled expression, clearly thinking some form of critical comment but not sharing it.

The door to the third floor is not yellow. It looks like a normal door, doesn’t particularly scream ‘worms beyond this point’ like he thinks it should proclaim in large neon letters. Forcing himself to take a deep breath, he reaches out for the door and turns the handle.

His eyes water and he gags. The scent of rotting fruit is overpowering, like stepping into a compost heap.

“Good Lord,” Jon chokes out behind him. Tim turns and watches Jon pull the sleeve of his sweater over his left hand, holding it up to his nose. The other hand is clutched white-knuckled around the fire extinguisher, currently the only outward sign of Jon’s nervousness.

The light from the stairwell barely illuminates the long stretch of hall. The window at the far end doesn’t seem to be letting in any of the light from the streets below.

“How do you explain this?” he asks, gesturing to the darkened hall.

“A-a localized outage. Or all the bulbs burned out at the same time and one of Martin’s neighbours is particularly lax at disposing their trash.” Jon weakly supplies, the excuses falling rather flat. His voice is muffled through his coat sleeve.  
  
Tim ushers Jon into the hall instead of arguing. A tap on his screen has his phone’s torch turning on, and he follows after Jon.

When the door shuts behind them, all sound of life vanish, even the ambient street noise. It’s deathly quiet except for the sound of buzzing, a fly or a bee flying nearby. He instinctually tries to swat whatever it is away, but nothing’s there.

His skin crawls and he wraps his arm tighter around the fire extinguishers. This isn’t real. The sensations aren’t _real_ . There aren’t any worms on him, and there never will be. He just stared down the Unknowing, he can handle the — _squirming, ripping, burrowing_ —worms.

Something crunches underfoot. It’s a familiar sound, like stepping on a snail but slightly more gooey. He doesn’t need to look to know it’s one of the worms. With rising revulsion, he remembers worms don’t have a shell or an exoskeleton to crush. Why in the _hell_ are these things crunching?

“Tim, what was that?” Jon whispers from his left.

“Worms, which means she’s here,” he says, deadly serious. “Get the extinguisher ready. And let me put my phone in your shirt pocket. The extinguishers need two hands and we’re not gonna be able to see otherwise.”  
  
Jon nods and Tim slides the phone into the pocket on Jon’s shirt. They can’t really aim the torchlight, but it’s better than blindly stumbling into a mass of worms.

“Oh,” Jon quietly groans in disgust when they turn the corner. Silver worms writhe wetly in the light, shimmering like fresh caught fish. The majority squish against the edges of Martin’s door, trying to squeeze through the now sealed gaps, covering the wood with glistening trails of slime. More of them lie in a pile in the centre of the hall, an amorphous, squirming mass about half a meter high. Their movements create a viscerally revolting squelching that turns Tim’s stomach.  
  
They don’t seem to be aggressive at the moment, not like the worms he remembers. They don’t react to the torchlight or Jon’s noise, seemingly content to squirm without interruption. Yes, they press up against Martin’s door, but slowly, unintelligently, not at all like the ones in the tunnels. He might call their movements aimless, maybe even mindless.

Tim hadn’t exactly thought this plan through, but this makes him think he needn’t have bothered. If this is the bulk of Prentiss’ worms, three extinguishers and a lighter may be enough. The amount is almost pitiful in comparison to the sea that had blanketed the tunnels and Archives, covering every surface in silver and dark grey.  
  
“Where the hell is she?” Tim whispers as he glances up and down the hallway, nearly missing Jon’s panicked reaction. Unless she’s managed to hide beneath the floorboards, she’s clearly not here. Which is a major problem. If she’s hiding because she knows they’re here, they lose the benefit of surprise.

The mass of worms on the floor shifts with a giant squelch. Tim can’t fight a shudder. Why are they moving now, what’s happening?

A shape begins to rise from the worms. It’s like an absolutely revolting version of the Birth of Aphrodite.

Jon stares at the figure, transfixed. “Jon. _Jon_ ,” he hisses, shaking Jon's shoulder to get Jon to focus on him and not on the worms. If Prentiss notices them before she finishes getting out of her worm portal, they're screwed.  
  
Jon turns to look at Tim. His lips are blanched from how tightly he’s pressed them together. He tilts his head up to look Tim in the eyes and Tim finally understands just how deep Jon’s terror goes.

“Jon, we need to aim the extinguishers at her. If she dies, the worms will too.” At least, he thinks they do. He's trying to channel an inner calmness that he doesn’t quite feel.

“ _SHE_? Tim, there’s—that’s a person?! That’s Jane Prentiss?” Jon gasps. He takes a half step back, closer to Tim, staring at the humanoid shape rising out of the worms.

The dark, tangled hair is the first thing Tim sees. Worms wreathe it like a silver circlet. Then there’s a pitted forehead and eyes covered in enough worms as to effectively blind her. The mouth becomes visible next, and there’s a wet, meaty hacking while the figure continues to emerge, settling itself into the form that still occasionally haunts his nightmares: the shape of Jane Prentiss.

Worms drip off her like water, as if she’s just stepped out of a swimming pool. A tattered grey overcoat is wrapped around her, dark stains crusted into the aged fabric. More worms poke their heads through tears in the coat, still half nestled in the tunnels they have carved through her body.

With a final, phlegmy cough and a crack, Prentiss hunches over and unhinges her jaw. Worms spill from her mouth, coated in a dark liquid. Jon retches beside Tim, mirroring Prentiss. Tim fights the spike of nausea with a grimace.

Jane Prentiss slowly rises from her hunched position. It’s a delicate movement, as though her hollowed bones might break under the strain. Her knees are turned inwards and her arms hang boneless in front of her.  
  
“ _Archiv_ _esssssss_ ,” she speaks in a slimy, sibilant voice. The dark liquid still drips from her lips, more viscous than blood but too thin to be mucous. If she were to smile or open her mouth wider, Tim thinks he would see her chipped, cracked teeth coated with it.

Standing face to face with the being that destroyed his semblance of a happy life, Tim feels his remaining fear catalyse into rage. This is all Prentiss’ fault. Everything that came after her was all caused by her influence, all came about from her desire to destroy the Archives and the Institute. Killing her here, now, that will change _everything_.

The faceless figure of Sasha James won’t haunt his dreams, and he won’t have to recount what happened to Danny unwillingly to a tape recorder. He’ll never have to catalogue every interaction with his coworkers in case they get replaced without him knowing. Jon won’t ever invade his privacy, won’t stalk him or dig into his records, and it won’t all be hand-waved away because ‘Jon is going through a lot right now’, completely avoiding that Tim had _also_ been eaten by worms and hadn't ended up stalking his coworkers! He won’t have to learn about the Unknowing and its connection to the Circus of the Other on _accident_ from _Martin_!

Maybe this time, he can keep his friends alive, save them so they can find a way out—because there has to be some way to renounce the job and get away from Elias. There has to be a way to get out from under the gaze of the god they have unwillingly and unknowingly served.

But there’s certainly no way out for him, even if he does manage to flee across the world from the Institute. The end of his life was determined in a handful of seconds on an early August morning. Tim is always going to die taking down the Circus. He might as well make it his own damn choice when, where, and how he goes. It’s better than dying from scorning literal contractual obligations.

So he doesn’t recoil when she speaks. He doesn’t flinch, even though the phantom worm trails itch under his skin. He holds one of the extinguishers in his hands, points it at Prentiss, and hopes that he can convey the sheer depths of his hatred for her in a glare. He snarls at her: “I hope this hurts.”

Prentiss shrieks when he empties the extinguisher in her face. The worms scream too, a harmony of shrill, organic noises. They’re lost in Prentiss’ pain, tangling around each other as if to shield themselves from the torment.

Jon angles his extinguisher down at the worms, trying to clear a path while Tim steps as close to Prentiss as he dares. Prentiss stumbles backward, choking.

Dead worms pile up as Tim inches closer. He continues to empty the extinguisher in her face, driving her back down the hall.

She tries to step closer to him, a hand with no fingernails reaching out to grab him. He throws the empty extinguisher at her. Prentiss barely dodges, pulling back with a loud snap and half collapsing with a loud, gurgling cry—one of her bones must have broken. The extinguisher clatters to the floor and the remaining worms wake from their fugue.

Tim gets ready to spray an escape route so they can put some space between them and Prentiss. But the worms brush past him without attacking. Jon is even able to spray some as they go past him. They surge towards Prentiss, wrapping around her bare, cratered legs.

Is Prentiss trying to retreat through another worm portal? He calls to Jon to stop her. If she gets away, she’ll definitely invade the Institute. And she’ll be cleverer, warier, will know all their tricks; she'll be impossible to take down. If she doesn’t die here, now, this will all have been for nothing!

He forces himself even closer as Prentiss starts to sink back down into the worms. He aims the second extinguisher at her face, empties it as fast as he can. Prentiss is left gasping, and the worms around her are slowed or dying.

When the extinguisher's empty, he bludgeons her with it. She collapses forwards into the worms, one arm stretched out to brace herself. He pulls back and swings again, as hard as he can. Her skulls dents under the impact. One more swing, and she sprawls out in front of him, dark fluid pooling around her. She doesn't get back up

He drops the extinguisher into the pile of worms. He’s done it. He’s altered the future.

“…Jon, do you have the lighter,” he asks, trying to breathe as deep as he can without choking on the air.

Jon holds the lighter with trembling hands. It takes him several hurried attempts to light the damn thing, fingers shaking with such intensity he nearly drops it before proffering it to Tim.

Tim kneels and holds the lighter out to a puddle of the oily liquid. It’s probably flammable? Jordan Kennedy’d lit that Jon Amherst guy on fire without even trying, so hopefully flammability was one of the ways the Corruption manifested in its avatars.

The liquid ignites almost instantly, forcing Tim to jerk his hand back so he doesn’t burn himself. The fire begin to spread, twisting flames reaching toward the worm corpses. He can...He can work with that.

He stands and turns back to Martin’s door.

The worms that had been trying to squeeze in have fallen away, having retreated back to Prentiss in her final moments. Tim stomps on the worm corpses underfoot for good measure, then hammers on the door with a closed fist.

“Martin! It’s Tim and Jon, Prentiss is dead!” Can Martin even hear him? Prentiss’ screams had probably driven Martin deeper into his flat, as far away from the sounds as he could get.

Tim inhales and feels the unpleasant warmth in the air, smells the thick smoke billowing from the rapidly spreading fire. It’s rot and vinegar and the odour that lurks under layers of disinfectants at hospitals.

He’s not going to wait for the fire to reach them. The door rattles in its frame as he bangs on it again. Jon joins him, shouting for Martin.

Behind the door, there’s a scraping noise. The deadbolt clicks and the door opens to reveal a disheveled Martin. He’s got a corkscrew in one hand and a pocketknife in the other. “What the—?” he starts, but chokes on the smoke.

Tim reaches out to him. “Prentiss is dead. I can explain later, but we need to go _right now_ ,” he tells Martin, jerking his head at the spreading fire.

“Oh—Alright? _OK_?” Martin stutters, linking his arm in Tim’s. He peers around at the fire, the dead worms, and at Jon and Tim, baffled and panicked.

Tim reaches his other arm out to Jon, who is still shellshocked. Jon threads his arm in Tim’s, and Tim starts to pull them towards the exit as fast as he can.

He pulls the fire alarm when they pass it. It lets out an unnatural screech that rattles his eardrums and begins to flash, casting the dirty walls in harsh white light. If Martin has neighbors (and if any of them are alive), hopefully they'll get out before the fire reaches their flats.

They make it to the door to the stairwell. Tim wrenches it open and it slams against the wall, smashing a hole in the plasterboard. He doesn’t have time to feel bad about it, slamming the door closed behind them to delay the spread of the fire.

He can’t hear the fire alarm in the stairwell. It should be going off on the lower floors but he can’t hear that, either. Instead, he hears the rush of passing cars and the loud pop song from below.

It’s stupid and dangerous, but he opens the door again, expecting to see the fiery hallway thick with smoke. The door opens to a bright hallway, light radiating from the fixture overhead. It’s a bit worn down and smells like cheap commercial air freshener... and is decidedly _not_ the hallway they’ve just come from. “That…. That’s not supposed to happen,” he says, because even as experienced as he is with entity bullshit, this is new to him.

“Ok, what the _hell_!” Martin whispers with a panicked grimace that’s trying to pass itself off as an anxious smile. His arm is still interlocked with Tim’s and he pulls it tighter around Tim’s, as if he’s worried Tim will disappear like that hallway if he lets go.

“Tim, where did the hallway go?” Jon questions in a soft voice.

He has no fucking clue. That space was real, it had to have been for them to have pulled Martin out of it, but it’s gone. Now, come to think of it, there _were_ a few statements of people going in to spaces that didn’t exist. That man in the almost infinite slaughterhouse, the guy who got stuck in an endless sky. So, ok. Sure. Manifesting pocket dimensions is a thing now. That’s the least improbable sounding shit he’s had to experience today.

He doesn’t want to talk about this in the stairwell, not with Martin clutching the pocketknife like it's his lifeline and Jon noticeably trembling beside him. Honestly, he’s not doing much better. If anything else is thrown at him he’s going to shut down completely. He forgot what being Tim was this morning, then sacrificed himself shortly afterwards (does it count as a sacrifice if he was intending to get himself killed in the first place?) and then wound up back in fucking time and killed the being that’d destroyed the few good things he’d had in his ruined life. He just… He needs a minute. Enough time to settle the emotions filtering up into his awareness.

He’s not quite sure what these emotions are, not anymore, having tried to rip the full spectrum of human emotion out of his heart like a weed, tried to salt and burn the roots so they wouldn’t come back. Despair, anger, vengeance, fear, he knows them and their cousins intimately. The rest are strangers.

  
“We’re going to my flat. We can talk about it there.”

  
Martin pulls on Tim’s arm. “Wait, wait, wait, Tim, how’d you and Jon know to come? I don’t have my phone, I dropped it—”

  
“Prentiss had it,” he replies. Prentiss had the phone. On her person. And the hallway has vanished, meaning Martin’s out a phone again. “She was texting us as you. She told us you were sick, we didn’t know,” he says, terse. He tries to herd them down the stairs.

“Oh god, she didn’t use my sick days, did she? I _need_ those,” Martin starts to ramble. “What if something comes up and I need to use them and I can’t because _she_ ’ _s_ gone and used them all? Does the Institute have a policy on that? Can I-I don’t know, talk to Elias about it? Can we get proof she was here so I can prove to Elias I didn’t want her using my sick days? Will Elias even believe me?” He sounds on the verge of tears.

Tim isn’t sure where to even start with that. He could say that they can’t be fired, so Martin can take as many days off as he wants, but he still has enough sense to know that’s a really stupid idea. It’d just open up a massive can of—well, worms. It’s another conversation that shouldn’t be had in a stairwell. The revelation would bring shouting, and Martin’s holding a knife. People would quickly get the wrong idea.

It’s jarring to see Martin like this. He knew this Martin, was friends with him, but it’s been over a year. They've both changed. The Martin Tim had pushed away leading up to the Unknowing was willing to draw Elias’ ire by burning statements, had lived in the Archives for months, found Gertrude’s body in the tunnels, and been thrown into the hallways with Tim. This Martin still worries about being caught having faked his CV, terrified that if he does anything to draw scrutiny he’ll be found out, his working hours devoted to being useful enough to Jon that he won’t get fired.

Tim has faint memories of Martin asking him for help in early February of 2015, looking for ways to convince Jon he was he was worth keeping in the Archives. Their reviews would be coming up in June and Martin believed he’d be getting disciplined if not outright fired if he couldn’t prove his usefulness. Tim hadn’t honestly thought Jon would fire Martin, but he’d tried to help Martin out to be nice. Sasha’d probably helped, too. It hadn’t mattered in the end; Jon’s criticisms had mostly tapered off after Prentiss, and they’d never even done the review that year. They were all a bit preoccupied with worms. There hadn't been one this year, either. No point, really, as their employment wasn’t actually tied to their job performance.

“Martin,” Jon starts. Tim casts his eyes skyward as they head down to the second floor, begging that Jon won’t say something hideously insensitive without thinking. Tim doesn’t know how to comfort people any more, would have no idea what to do with a crying Martin. “If it is that concerning to you, I can speak to Elias on your behalf and request that you be allowed more sick days. Seeing as you were… ah, trapped by a… supernatural entity that used them without your permission.”

Tim stumbles on a step, surprised at Jon’s response. Jon hasn’t been that nice in a long time.

His mind drifts back to the past, or, really, the present.

He’s done what countless people have dreamt about, would sacrifice anything and everything for. In a way, he had. One life traded for another, scooped out of time and released upstream. Killing Prentiss has diverted the river; all he can do is hope the new course won’t begin to mimic the one he’s left.


	2. it took so long for me to speak up

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After arriving at his flat, Tim explains some things about his future while they wait for Sasha to arrive.
> 
> PLEASE be mindful of the content warnings at the end of the note.
> 
> chapter title from encoder, by pendulum

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So... It's been a minute, hasn't it? I planned on getting this out before the end of October but my free time evaporated after I posted chapter 1. I work ~40 hour weeks at a grocery store (it's... Rough) and I'm trying to figure out what ducks I need to get in a row to transfer to a 4 year so it was tough finding time to edit this. 
> 
> Anyway, here it is now! Sasha is now Sir Appearing-In-This-Fic, and I threw in some headcanon(s) about Tim and his relationship with his parents/family because we didn't really get any information on his family in canon (like, did they Know? Did Tim tell them? why do they never come up? Jon's an orphan raised by his grandmother, Sasha died before we got the assistants' backstories, and we know about Martin's mum and his father, but we don't seem to hear anything about Tim's family besides Danny. Then again, we never hear anything about Daisy or Basira's family either...)
> 
> Still unbeta'd and not britpicked, so please let me know if there's any glaringly obvious typos that I missed or if I've got something horribly wrong.  
> 
> 
> ALSO, wanted to give an extra warning about something that comes up. Tim was suicidal at the end of Season 3, but it wasn't ever discussed in depth. Here I expand on it a little bit and that could be triggering; basically it's implied that Tim knew that once he died, everyone who didn't know the truth might think he committed suicide (he kind of did?). Tim knew that he could leave a note to clear things up, but he didn't, because he didn't want to ruin his parents' image of him. I've **bolded the first and last sentences so that they can be skipped** , just in case. I figure it's better to be safe than sorry.
> 
> content warnings for this chapter (not including those already in the tags): memory alteration/memory loss/ forgetting a person (permanently), mentions of worms, suicidal thoughts and actions, mentions of what could be construed as a suicide note, mentions of suicide/a death that could be seen as suicide, brief mention of body-horror, brief mention of issues that arise from Jon's Archivist powers (these are based off of some incorrect assumptions Tim has regarding how Jon could influence statement givers)

Tim stands at the door to his flat, keys in hand.

“Tim,” Jon asks, presumably because it’s just occurred to him, “if you’re going to explain, shouldn’t Sasha be present for it?”

Oh. Shit. The keys clatter to the ground. He stares at them, dumbstruck, then furious. He’s… He’s forgotten about her again. He was so caught up in taking Prentiss out that he hardly noticed she was still alive.

He fumbles for his phone, rushes to unlock it.

Sasha’s contact photo is unfamiliar. She’s sitting in the booth of a pub he can’t recognize, sticking her tongue out at whoever’s taking the photo—presumably him? One hand is reaching out towards the camera, like she’s trying to stop him from catching her making a face. Seeing this hint of what their friendship was like before pulls the tide of guilt back to the forefront of his mind.

He scarcely breathes through the dial tones. It’s one of the longest moments of his life.

The call goes through but there’s no sound for a moment. Tim doesn’t dare to speak first. Then the person on the other end yawns. “Tim? What’s going on? It’s rather late,” asks the woman who must be Sasha James. She sounds mildly annoyed, like he’s just woken her up.

He should be feeling something at this revelation of her voice, but there’s nothing there. It’s the voice of a complete stranger.

If he doesn’t say something fast, though, she might assume it’s a late night misdial and hang up. So he starts stringing words together. “Sasha, could you, uh, come over—Jon and I took care of Jane Prentiss—and I’ve got to explain some things.” Sasha’s got to have come over before, right? Surely she knows his address. It’s not going to be weird.

The line is quiet for several seconds while Sasha processes. “Sorry, Tim, what? Jane Prentiss? The worm woman from the ECDC?” Her tone is so dry he scrambles to decipher whether she’s taking him seriously or if she thinks he’s wasting her time with a stupid joke.

He sighs. If he knew her, hadn’t had the truth of her taken and twisted and lost, he’d be able to tell. Instead, he’s had to grieve for someone he struggles to remember was real, taken by the same power that stole his brother while he could do nothing but watch. “Yeah,” he continues, less expressive than before, “Martin wasn’t out sick. Prentiss was at his flat this whole time. She’s had his phone.”

“What? How did he come in contact with Jane Prentiss? How did he not die? She’s got a _body count_ , Tim.” He can hear fabric shifting in the background and creaking floorboards.

“Prentiss was at Carlos Vittery’s flat. Martin went to check it after work. She followed him back to his flat and wouldn’t let him leave,” he says, matter-of-factly. “He was there for…” He trails off because he doesn’t actually know; he’s not looked at today’s date.

Martin’s still standing nearby, though. He’s picked up the keys, the lanyard threaded between his fingers.

“Martin, how many days was it?”

Martin narrows his eyes as he tries to recall. When he speaks, it’s devoid of his usual cheer. “Um, if day and night worked right, I think it was four days?”

“Oh. Martin’s there?” Sasha seems embarrassed to realize Martin could’ve overheard what she’s just said about him. “Let him know it’s good to hear he’s alright,” she continues, tone stilted. He can hear what he thinks are her keys jingling and a door shutting.“Tim, I’m on my way now. I’ll let you know when I get in.”

“Yeah. ‘Bye—” she hangs up before he can finish speaking, “—Sasha.” Figures.

Martin passes him his keys and he picks out the right one.He gives the door a quick check before he opens it, just to make sure it’s not turned yellow since he looked away. It hasn’t, so he turns the key in the lock and lets them in.

Turning on the lights, he gets a glimpse of his flat. There’s a pot soaking in the sink, an empty glass left out on the table—but it doesn’t really matter. He’s not going to get embarrassed over a lived in flat, it’s past Tim’s fault for not cleaning.

That doesn’t stop the sensation of wrongness as he steps inside, though. This is his flat, but it’s not _his_ flat.

 **That flat hadn’t been lived in**. He’d cleaned it up as best he could so that it would be easier for his family to deal with, since he knew he probably wasn’t going to come back.

He hadn’t left a note. What would he have told them? He couldn’t say that he’d known this was going to happen, because then he’d have to explain that this was for revenge, this was an escape, that this was the only way to tear himself out of the nightmare he’d been stitched into. He couldn’t do that, not without ruining their image of him.  
  
Well, more than it’d already been ruined. His parents had never accepted that he’d gone off to work at the Magnus Institute, still thought one day he’d come to his senses and go back into his field (not like he even _could_ , at that point). They couldn’t fathom why he’d dropped his successful publishing career after Danny had gone missing to work at a place that, to them, collected ghost stories.

And of course it didn’t help that he couldn’t explain that he’d had a _legitimate reason to do so_ . He refused to tell them the truth about Danny. First, he would never burden his parents with that information. He was going to take it to his grave, couldn’t live with them ever knowing how badly Danny must have suffered. Second, they’d never believe him anyway. And third, well, even if they _did_ somehow believe him, they’d blame him for not saving Danny. He’d blamed himself for so long, had drowned in guilt and self-hatred for not staying up with Danny longer, and still felt what he could only describe as a deep despair that Danny had died knowing Tim hadn’t come to save him. He knew now that there had been nothing he could’ve done, that Danny had already been marked by it as prey. If he’d stopped Danny that night the Circus would’ve found him another way. Danny had been like Helen Richardson, who’d escaped from the hallways only to get tricked back in.  
  
 **It was better for all of them that he left them with questions they would never be able to answer.**

“—im? Tim?” Jon’s standing next to him, reaching out a hand in a tentative, catlike motion.

Tim jerks away before Jon can touch him. “I’m fine.” There’s no telling how long he’s been staring blankly at the flat. Martin’s undoubtedly thinking Tim’s lost it, just a little bit.

Jon is unconvinced, staring at Tim with a single eyebrow raised in disapproval. As though Tim's a child caught in an extremely obvious lie. But Jon doesn’t argue, and instead carefully takes off his shoes before moving further into the flat.

Tim chucks off his own shoes in the corner of the entryway, ignoring the shoe-shelf entirely.

Martin is still standing there, holding his trainers in one hand and the corkscrew in the other. Tim wordlessly gestures to the couch.

Jon goes to sit in the armchair, like he used to back in Research, back when they’d actually been friends. Jon never remembered the stuffing in the chair isn’t firm enough to hold its shape. The longer he sits, the deeper he’ll sink.

Martin pulls out his pocketknife and sets it and the corkscrew down on the coffee table, out of the way but still within arm’s reach. He tucks himself in to the right corner of the sofa, pulling his knees up so that his feet don’t touch the floor. It’s not lost on Tim that sitting in the right corner lets Martin keep constant watch on the door.  
  
As he’s starting to sit, Martin stops him.“Wait, wait, Tim, can we put something down to block the door? Just in case there’s any worms?”

There shouldn’t be. The worms shouldn’t have followed them back, not if that whole pocket dimension had completely collapsed with them inside it. Well. He assumes that it’d collapsed on itself. He has no idea how any of this works. There’s never been any logic behind the supernatural.

With a towel wedged firmly under the door, Tim finally finds himself sitting on his sofa. He takes a deep breath and stares blankly at the dark screen of his TV. It’s as though a set of warped lenses have fallen over his perception. Is his exhaustion finally catching up with him, or is it a side effect of the Unknowing causing this dreamlike sensation?  
  
Even Jon is quiet. He’s withdrawn, and it’s unclear if he’s lost in thought or simply worrying.

Martin breaks the silence. “You never answered my question, before.” He’s a bit hesitant.

“Hm? Which one?” Martin had asked quite a lot of them and he’d sidestepped most of the difficult to explain ones.

“Just. How you knew to come, I guess?” Martin shrugs. He stares down at the corkscrew. “You said Prentiss was texting everyone as me, and she told you all I was sick to keep you all from noticing something was wrong. And that—I guess that’s the question I really want answered, Tim. Why’d you suddenly realize something wasn’t right? I just—I don’t, um,” he stutters, fumbling with his phrasing. Martin’s always done this, though admittedly Tim has seen less of it recently, this couching of words in platitudes so that Martin won’t upset whoever he’s speaking with.

Martin stumbles a bit more before finally blurting out, “Well, I don’t think any of you would come over to check on me.”

Tim’s friendship with Martin, if you could call it that, before he’d gone and blown himself and that clown up, had been… tense. Tim hadn’t ever thought of them as particularly close, as he’d said on one of those damn tapes, and that distance had grown as Martin continued to believe paranoid literal actual murderer Jonathan Sims hadn’t actually beat a man to death in his office and hadn’t caused what they’d thought was Sasha to disappear.

He shouldn’t have taken it out on Martin, but Tim couldn’t restrain that anger. It was wildfire, scorching every person and emotion in its path, jumping from Jon to the others.

He hadn’t said anything to Martin when they’d left, though Martin had tried to reach out. Tim’d cut him off, not wanting to hear some kind of hollow platitude as Martin failed to keep their fucked up up group together. There was no point in any kind of reconciliation, no point in attempting to traverse a burnt out bridge, not when he was heading off to his death.

Suffice it to say, if this had been the actual Tim from 2016 here, it would probably hurt him to hear that. Since he’s not that Tim any more, it doesn’t.

He’s just going to rip the plaster off quickly, then, save them all the trouble of a delicate explanation. “I’ve already lived through this whole mess,” he says, tiredly.

“What-?” Martin’s gaze darts between him and Jon, confused. As if Jane Prentiss is going to stumble out from behind the armchair, peel off her SFX makeup and reveal that this was a colossally fucked up prank.

Martin finally settles on looking at Jon, taking in Jon’s neutral expression, his stunning lack of any argument. “ _Okay_?” he says, higher pitched, still incredulous.

Of course Martin bases his opinion on Jon’s own. He can’t take Tim at his word.  
  
The tension in Jon’s jaw subsides as he takes a deep breath. “I believe Tim, Martin. His predictions have been too accurate to even consider writing them off as coincidental.”

“Glowing praise, boss.” His response is practically instinctual at this point, and he realizes too late to hold back the venom.

Jon tilts his head at that and blinks in confusion. Then he sighs. “Tim, I really do believe you. I’m sorry that I didn’t before.”

“Okay, so, what, it really is time travel...?” Martin trails off, uneasy. He picks at his nails in nervous thought. He stops. “Wait, wait, Tim did no one come to my flat in your time? Did I… God, I didn’t die there, did I? I didn’t turn into whatever Prentiss was?” His tone is insistent, but he looks away from Tim instead of seeing his reaction; like he doesn’t want his theory confirmed by Tim’s expression.

So, Martin thinks that they’d never questioned the texts and had gone on with their lives. That he’d either starved to death or been torn apart by worms intent on carving out a home in his flesh. Martin’s probably already considered what his last thoughts must have been… most likely that he’d known with certainty that none of them were coming to save him.

The shitty thing is that Martin’s guess is... not completely wrong? He’s absolutely right in that none of them ever bothered checking on him. When he’d first gotten Martin’s messages, he’d taken them at face value. There’d been no reason to think otherwise. He’d gone back to his work without a second thought. Guilt finally condenses in Tim’s lungs.

“No, Martin, you didn’t die.” he says, slowly. “Prentiss left after about two weeks and you made it to the Institute. Jon let you stay in the Archives. I think the plan was for you to stay there until Prentiss was dealt with?” Tim scoffs. “Not like we ever had a plan for getting rid of her, really.”  
  
“Elias _allowed_ that?” Jon says, surprised.

“Yeah? It’s not like he could stop you. He could bluster about it but it’d never go anywhere.”

“Y _es,_ _it could?_ Elias could fire me?” Jon puts a hand to his temple. He’s caught the implication. “Tim. You’re—you’re not saying there’s something _preventing_ us from being fired, are you?” Martin’s staring at Tim, too, like he’s trying to puzzle out a particularly difficult equation.  
  
Tim runs hand through his hair and sighs again. This is going to be such a god damn mess to explain. It’s a convoluted web of interconnected people and places. Where would he even start? The chronological beginning? Should he be explaining the entities first so that there’s a foundation to build on? Will it even make sense to them, this early? They believe him about the time travel, but what about everything with Elias? Will they trust what he says about the bastard or will they continue to believe he’s nothing more than a distant and overly bureaucratic manager?

He’s saved by his phone buzzing and a knock at the door. His heart stops.

Sasha is… She’s tall. Not as tall as him or Martin, but about the same height as Jon. Her dark hair is loose and falls in slight waves around her shoulders. Her face is flushed slightly from the cold. She’s wearing a half buttoned overcoat over a hoodie and turtleneck. He tries to capture every detail of her, down to the shape of her glasses, so that he won’t ever forget her again.

“Sasha?” he asks. She looks just like the photographs of her, but he needs to know for certain.

“Yeah, it’s me.” She waves her hands slightly as she announces herself. “I didn’t imagine our phone call, did I?” she jokes. It misses the mark.

How _do_ you tell someone that you’ve completely forgotten them in what appears to be the span of a single day?

He’s had dreams like this, sometimes. He gets to speak with Sasha before she died. He gets to warn her. They don’t happen as often as they ought to, as even his subconscious can’t seem to remember her and can’t construct a suitable stand-in; when he speaks with her it’s always done indirectly. Always over email or through text messages, and never anything handwritten. On the rare occasion he finds himself speaking with her (though he hesitates to call it speaking as he never hears her voice; her words are beamed into his dream-self’s brain) it’s always over the phone or from another room. He never gets to see her face.  
And none of those dream conversations have prepared him for this. This is the real Sasha, not the personality-less and empty facade he begs to never go near Artefact Storage.

Quiet footsteps come from behind him and Jon speaks. “Sasha, it’s been… some time since Tim has seen you.”

Tim breathes in relief. If Jon knows it’s her, then this is absolutely Sasha James. The weight of his unease begins to filter away.

Sasha’s thrown by Jon’s comment, though. “Jon, that doesn’t make any sense? I spoke with him before I left this evening?” She grips her bag tightly in her hands, unmoored.

“Sasha. I got thrown back in time. I’m from 2017, and you… God,” he shakes his head, “you died over a year ago.”

Sasha presses her lips into a thin frown and then something in her eyes shifts. “Tim...” she says, soft and sad, voice slowly fading out. He doesn’t know her well enough to detect the minutiae in her tone. She steps inside and reaches a hand out comfortingly on his shoulder. Is this a familiar gesture? Does she believe him or is she simply pitying him?

Sasha flops on to the middle seat of the sofa. How many times had she visited to have such an obvious familiarity with the place?

Jon sits back in the armchair, then leans forward to reach his satchel, dark hair falling in his face. He pulls his laptop from its depths, then sits cross-legged.

“Jon… What are you doing?” Sasha raises an eyebrow. She’s taken off her overcoat and it rests haphazardly folded in her lap.  
  
“I intend to take notes on what Tim is planning to tell us,” Jon says, as if that’s the only rational thing to be done in this moment, and the rest of them are odd for not having considered it. “I would ask Tim if we could take an audio recording that I could transcribe later, but I am certain whatever he says will corrupt a digital file and I hadn’t thought I’d needed to take the tape recorder home with me.” Not yet, at least, Tim silently adds. There were only supposed to be two, but the things had been popping up all over the Archives. He’d taken to chucking them into the waste-bin at his desk when he caught them listening in. If it ever got filled up he’d planned on dumping it at Artefact Storage. He’d break them, but Jon had shown why destroying supernatural objects was not a good idea.  
  
“Alright.” It is the best way to make sure they stay safe. His memory’s not infallible and if anything happens to him he doesn’t want them to lose access to what he knows. He looks Jon in the eyes. “But you’re not asking any questions. This isn’t a statement.”

Jon pauses, slightly affronted. “I never said it was, Tim. Why does it matter if I’m asking the questions or not?”

Tim has a theory. If Jon can force the truth from people with a question, even command others, to an extent (because what else could it have been when Jon asked him what he saw, when Jon asked him what was was in his hands, had pulled away the confusion of not-being and Tim found that he had a body and hands and a goal?) then who’s to say he can’t force someone to recount their trauma into a statement?

“It’s one of the powers you get. Can make people tell you things, even if they don’t want to.”  
  
“...Powers, Tim. I get supernatural—wait. Oh, god.” He goes pale. “Tim, I haven’t—I’ve not been forcing statements out of people, have I?” He asks, panicked.

Well, Tim can’t remember how many live statements have happened already, so he can’t say. Certainly, coming to the Magnus Institute meant they at least wanted to tell the Archivist _something_.

Come to think of it, though… Wasn’t it unusual how every statement they’d come across that had to record on tape had ended up sounding like a fully fledged horror story? All nicely laid out with a beginning and an end, no unnecessary details or loose ends? What if that was one of the powers Jon got, too? The ability to influence _how_ people told their trauma?

“I don’t know. How natural do you think people giving you a structured monologue is?” This _must_ be a Jon thing. When Jon’d been kidnapped, every tape interview had been a wreck, statement givers rambling, not giving enough detail, or not making sense.

“ _Oh_ , _shit_.” Jon’s face crumples and he buries his head in his hands.

“But how does that even happen? How do you get _powers_ from a _job position_? It’s not like you get hired on as an accountant and _bam!_ you suddenly unlock the ability to keep spreadsheets in your head!” Martin exclaims, rattled.   
  
Looks like he's going to start with the entities first, then.  
  
“Tim, how did you even figure that out?” Sasha questions. “The supernatural, well, it exists, of course, but how does it go from expressing itself in artefacts to presenting itself in a person?”  
  
They’re all waiting for answers.

Tim hopes that they aren’t utterly devastated by the truth. If they are, there won’t be any way to save them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next chapter, Tim starts to break down the entities and the future. Sasha learns how she died and why Tim is acting strange around her. Martin finds out he might be the only one of them left alive. Jon has to learn he got kidnapped multiple times, that he may be dead, too, and that he got framed for murder.
> 
> And if you're wondering what Elias is doing while all this is going down, I guess he's asleep? He checked the Archives at like 9 pm and saw Jon getting ready to leave and Tim "asleep" at his desk, so he figured everything was good and went to do other things like draft his 'Hello Jon' monologue. If he had any idea about what was going on, he would have ran out to a home-improvement store and then immediately tracked Tim down.
> 
> ......
> 
> Also! I have a tumblr now, but it turns out I should've checked username availability before changing my username here, hahaha, so it's actually [venndication](https://venndication.tumblr.com). I'm trying to be more active on there so we'll see how that goes.

**Author's Note:**

> confession: i have never written action or anything to do with horror, so i have no idea if any of it worked well? i have been nervously reworking this for so long that it's become mush in my brain (like are they in character? do their actions make sense? i can't tell any more. honestly i still want to edit but at some point you have to stop). moral is: perfectionism sucks. this would've been posted in june if i hadn't gotten stuck in a rewriting and editing loop in between working and college.
> 
> also, now that i think about it martin wouldn't have to worry about sick days, that's a uniquely american concern, isn't it? 
> 
> .......
> 
> this works as a one-shot but i do i have an outline for a second chapter? real-sasha is there and tim tries to explain. also, tim gets reminded in narrative that while his feelings about future Jon are, for the most part, valid, he shouldn’t be taking them out on this jon. 
> 
> if you spotted any typos or wonky punctuation or something that screams 'the author is american and didn't do thorough research!', please let me know.
> 
> I don't currently have a tumblr or twitter or anything, I'm just on here.


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